Multiple cooling resources, such as, air conditioning units, are typically deployed and shared among multiple locations that require cooling to dissipate heat generated in infrastructures, such as, data centers. Temperature sensors are also typically positioned throughout the infrastructures, which operate to identify the cooling requirements at the various locations in the infrastructures. Oftentimes, the cooling resources are operated to provide cooling based upon the demand at the various locations in the infrastructures as identified by the temperature sensors. In order to operate the cooling resources efficiently, the “region of influence” of each cooling resource is typically determined. The “region of influence” information identifies which cooling resource to manipulate if the temperature at a particular location changes.
The region of influence of each cooling resource differs depending on the locations of the temperature sensors, the configurations of the cooling resources, and the configurations of the paths of the cooling medium supplied by the cooling resources. The process of discovering the regions of influence of the cooling resources is often called “commissioning” and typically requires varying the actuation level of each cooling resource in turn and measuring its impact at each of the sensor locations. This commissioning process allows a corresponding sensitivity metric, which indicates the change in temperature value at a particular location as a result of a unit change in the actuation of the cooling resource, to be computed. Although the commissioning process yields accurate determinations of the regions of influence, the commissioning process is typically time-consuming and laborious.